an Augmented Reality Resource

Menu

News

Released in Early Access last month, Bevan McKechnie’s Compound is already one of our favorite VR shooters of the year, and it sounds like there are more good things to come.

Compound received one of its first big updates this week. McKechnie added a new map type to the roguelike shooter named Chemical Processing. It doesn’t change much; it’s still filled with the same enemies you see in the game’s existing environments, but the developer does say that new enemies will be added into the area in future updates. There’s a new music track too, but that’s pretty much it for the updates.

Perhaps the bigger story, though, is that McKechnie is now working on Compound full time. The developer had previously been working on the game in his spare time while keeping up a normal job, but recently handed in his resignation.

“A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has purchased the early access version of COMPOUND and allowed me to realize my childhood dream of being a real game developer,” the developer wrote. “Thank you so much! The long delay since the last update was due to the fact I had a lot of extra IRL work preparing things for my replacement. I still have to work for about another month, but once the hand-over is complete COMPOUND development should get a huge boost.”

The $500 million a court ordered Oculus owner Facebook to pay ZeniMax Media last year has been halved to $250 million in a new ruling.

A US judge also this week rejected ZeniMax’s request to have sales of the Oculus Rift banned, Bloomberg reports.

ZeniMax, parent company of videogame publisher and developer Bethesda, took Facebook to court last year over an alleged theft of technology. The company claimed that Oculus CTO John Carmack had used Bethesda’s resources when collaborating with Rift inventor Palmer Luckey in the early days of Oculus and stolen technology when he moved to the VR company from Bethesda-owned id Software in 2013. id was the first developer to work with Oculus, showcasing a VR version of Doom 3 running on a very early prototype of the Rift at E3 2012. ZeniMax filed the lawsuit after Facebook bought Oculus for what’s thought to be around $3 billion in 2014.

After a lengthy court battle, which saw Carmack, Luckey and even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg take the stand, a judge ordered Facebook to pay Bethesda $500 million. Carmack later took to Facebook to argue that the internet would have “viciously mocked” the analysis given in court.

Facebook vowed to appeal the decision at the time and, this Wednesday, 16 months on from the ruling, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade wiped out $250 million from the ruling, including damages leveled at Luckey and Oculus co-founder and former CEO, Brendan Iribe.

But Facebook isn’t stopping there; Vice President Paul Grewal confirmed to Bloomberg that the company still intends to appeal the remaining $250 million, adding: “We’ve said from day one the ZeniMax case is deeply flawed, and today the court agreed. Our commitment to Oculus is unwavering and we will continue to invest in building the future of VR.”

See the effects of PTSD first-hand in this hand-illustrated recollection of one Iraq War veteran’s haunting memories. Over the past couple of years post-traumatic stress disorder among military personnel has gained more national attention than ever before. After all, just because a soldier is home, doesn’t mean their fight is over. With roughly 12.5 percent

Google rolls out a 15-hour introduction into the ARCore platform. As AR continues to make its way into the mainstream, more developers than ever have been focusing their efforts on creating the next big augmented experience. But let’s say you, an average Joe with no knowledge of app development, had an idea for a hit

The Gallery Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone was a big step up for the VR adventure series and developer Cloudhead Games. One of the most memorable sections of the game involved the player being transported to and fro locations with the aid of an enormous stone giant named Boulder. It was pretty impossible not to fall in love with the silent behemoth as you watched him interact with a hologram of your sister, Elsie.

Today, Cloudhead resurrected its developer diary video series, detailing what went into making one of VR’s biggest characters yet. The six-minute clip features members of the team talking about the design of the character, which actually calls back to the original room-scale demo Cloudhead built for the unveiling of the HTC Vive three years ago. In fact there’s even footage of that demo, which we haven’t seen online before. Clearly, it was a long journey to then getting the right design, including different iterations of the episode’s script.

Sadly, there’s no word on Episode 3 for The Gallery just yet (studio head Denny Unger did tease that the series ‘still has its day coming’), though we’d expect it will still be a while before Cloudhead is ready to talk about that.

Covert is a new, upcoming collaboration between White Elk and Oculus to bring local co-op multiplayer to Go and Gear by way of a tense, high-profile heist VR game. White Elk Studios is the same developer behind Eclipse: Edge of Light, which won our Mobile VR Game of the Year award last year as a breakout title for the Daydream platform. Now with Covert, they’re doing something a bit different.

We still don’t know a whole lot yet, but we do know this is a heist-themed game this time around in similar fashion to something like Ocean’s Eleven. As a local co-op game that means one person wears the headset while being assisted by a friend outside of VR — similar to Black Hat Cooperative and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

As a master thief, you must steal a mysterious artifact from a safe inside a high-security museum. This means being careful as you sneak past security systems using ziplines and a whole host of other tools and gadgets at your disposal. While wearing the headset, you’ll have to rely on a partner to feed you details like “notes on museum blueprints and crucial warnings about guard locations, laser movements, and the safe’s internal mechanics.”

Until we see footage or try it for ourselves it’s hard to tell how this will work exactly, but it sounds extremely similar to the aforementioned Black Hat Cooperative. Hopefully it does something a bit different, though.

Covert is due out for Oculus Go and Gear VR later this year.

If you like these sort of asynchronous multiplayer games, there are a handful of other solid ones worth a try already out as well. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

If you’ve got an Oculus Rift you might want to make sure you’re running Windows 10 in the near future.

Today, Oculus announced that it is updating both the recommended and minimum specifications for its PC VR headset, listing Microsoft’s latest operating system on both. Previously the recommended specs asked for Windows 7 SP1 or newer and the minimum asked for Windows 8.1 or newer.

So why the change? Oculus says that Windows 10 will be required for some of the new features it’s adding to its Rift Core 2.0 platform in the near future. Currently, the beta for 2.0 does support Windows 7 and 8.1, but if users don’t upgrade then they won’t get the full experience in later updates. Oculus didn’t go into specifics about which features would require Windows 10, but we do know that 2.0 is set to introduce things like multiplayer support and user-generated content in the near future.

Not only that, but Oculus told UploadVR that it expects more Windows 10-required apps to arrive in the Oculus Store as time goes on. Right now the Rift’s store has around 100 apps that require Windows 10 and another 60 or so that require Windows 8.1. Effects on multiplayer games will be specific to each title.

According to Oculus, 95% of Rift owners are already running Windows 10, so this news won’t have any consequence to many. Other than that, there are no other changes to either set of specs; you won’t need any new hardware.